Our Hon’ble Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, envisages a Digital India to bridge the digital divide in our country and further promote digital literacy in order to make development a comprehensive mass movement and put governance within everyone’s reach in India.

In order to work towards our PM’s vision, Ministry of HRD, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) propose the Smart India Hackathon 2017, a unique initiative to identify new and disruptive digital technology innovations for solving the challenges faced by our country. This initiative aim to institutionalize a model for harnessing the creativity and technical expertise of 3.0 + million students for direct benefit of our nation. Mr. Prakash Javadekar, Hon’ble Minister, Ministry of HRD is the Chief Patron of this unique initiative, while Dr. Anil Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, AICTE & Dr. Anand Deshpande, Chairman, Founder & MD, Persistent Systems are the Chairman and Co-chairman of the organizing committee of this initiative respectively. NIC, MyGov, NASSCOM, UGC and Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini are co-organizers in this initiative. Besides this, several union ministries have agreed to be partners in this initiative.

Smart India Hackathon 2017 will be a computer programming competition which will involve all Engineering colleges with a reach to approximately 30 Lakh students from across India. We plan to challenge the students to think out-of-the-box and offer innovative ideas to build smart applications which will help address major real time problems in our country.

This Open Forum has been started so that participants can share their queries, issues and clarifications about the problem statements with Nodal Officers of respective Ministries and Departments.